For Whom the Bell Tolls

First published in 1940, For Whom the Bell Tolls is Ernest Hemingway’s sweeping novel of love, loyalty, and sacrifice during the Spanish Civil War. The story follows Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer fighting with the Republican forces, who is sent into the mountains of Spain to destroy a strategically vital bridge ahead of an offensive. There he joins a small band of guerrilla fighters led by the formidable Pilar and the increasingly troubled Pablo, and meets Maria, a young woman whose life has already been devastated by the war.

Set over the course of just a few tense days, the novel moves between the immediate dangers of Robert Jordan’s mission and larger questions of courage, political conviction, death, and the obligations people owe one another. Hemingway drew upon his own experiences reporting from Spain during the Civil War, giving the novel an unusually vivid sense of landscape, violence, camaraderie, and uncertainty. Yet beneath its story of warfare lies one of Hemingway’s most moving love stories, as Jordan and Maria attempt to imagine a future while knowing how little time may remain to them. For Whom the Bell Tolls became one of Hemingway’s greatest commercial and critical successes and remains one of the defining literary works to emerge from the Spanish Civil War.

From the book

“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

On For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Mr. Hemingway has always been the writer, but he has never been the master that he is in For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
— Ralph Thompson, The New York Times